Experimental Methods in Language Acquisition Research X 2014
Anniversary Edition!
Lectures and Hands-on Tutorials on Methodological Aspects of
Language Acquisition Research
General Information
Speakers:
| Emmanuel Dupoux | Paula Fikkert | Marianne Gullberg
Petra Hendricks | Sabine Hunnius| Annemarie Kerkhoff
Silvina Montrul | Marianne Pouplier | Tom Roeper |
Tutorials:
Articulography | CHILDES | Computational Methods | ERP
Eye Tracking: Reading | Eye Tracking: Visual World Paradigm
LENA & Analysis of Spontaneous Speech| Multilevel Analysis
A User’s Guide to PRAAT | A User’s Guide to PRAAT Advanced |
Preferential Looking/Listening |SPSS | SPSS Advanced |
Statistics with R | Statistics with R Advanced
CONTENTS
LOCATION
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BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT / AIR
3
BY CAR
3
ACCOMMODATION
3
MAP
4
SUGGESTED LUNCHPLACES
5
PROGRAMME
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TUTORIALS
8
ABSTRACTS
8
Talks
8
Tutorials
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Poster abstracts
14
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LOCATION
EMLAR X will be mainly held at Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, 3512 HM Utrecht (Netherlands). The
registration desk will be in the small cantina next to room 0.06, where the plenary lectures are given.
The lectures and most of the tutorials (unless otherwise specified) will take place in this building,
although the Poster Session will take place in Trans 10, room 0.07.
NOTE: The Eye-Tracking: Reading and Preferential Looking/Listening tutorials are the only ones which
are not held in Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, but at a different location: Janskerkhof 13, which is at a
walking distance from the main location. For directions see the map.
E-mail and internet can be used in room 1.08 at Kromme Nieuwegracht 80.
The login and password are available at the registration desk.
BY PUBLIC TRANSPORT / AIR
The main Dutch airport at Amsterdam (Schiphol) is connected to Utrecht by a direct train, as are
most other Dutch cities. For train schedules and prices, see the website of NS, the Dutch railways.
Utrecht Centraal is the name of the railway station you will want to use. While waiting for your
luggage you can buy a train ticket at the yellow/blue self-service ticket machine.
Walking from Utrecht Centra(a)l Station takes 15-25 minutes. For directions, see the map below.
There is also a good bus network. The nearest stop is Domplein, served only by bus line 2
(Museumkwartier Ringlijn) and also close is Janskerkhof, served by lines 11 (Uithof/UMC WKZ), 3
(Homeruslaan), 4 (Burg. F. Andreaelaan), and 8 (Overvecht Zuid). To plan a trip by public transport
within the Netherlands, use the 9292ov site.
BY CAR (NOT RECOMMENDED)
You are most likely to find (expensive) parking spots at Janskerkhof, Lepelenburg, Kruisstraat or
Springweg (indicated on signs from main roads). Traffic in Utrecht is restricted and can take a lot of
time, as in most old city centers.
ACCOMMODATION
For a list of suggestions for accommodation please check the website (NB: Prices may have changed;
we do not officially endorse these establishments in any way.)
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MAP
The map shows the railway Station Utrecht Centra(a)l . The poster session and drinks will be at Trans
10, room 0.07. Kromme Nieuwegracht 80 is where all lectures, as well as most tutorials will be held.
The Eye:-Tracking: Reading and Preferential Looking/Listening tutorials will be held at Janskerkhof
13. When walking through Utrecht, the Dom tower (112 meters) is a nice reference point; see the
picture below. It is marked as a dark blue circle.
(A) Utrecht Centraal, (B) Trans 10, (C) Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, (D) Janskerkhof 13, circle: Dom
church tower
The pictures below are the Dom church and the entrance of Trans 10.
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The pictures above are the entrance of Kromme Nieuwegracht 80 and Janskerkhof 13, respectively.
SUGGESTED LUNCHPLACES
Name
Bakkerswinkel
Bigoli
Brasserie Domplein
Broers
Café de Vingerhoed
Café Orloff
Hofman
Lokaal de Reunie
Schrans
Winkel van Sinkel
Address
Wittevrouwenstraat 2
Schoutenstraat 12
Domplein 20
Janskerkhof 9
Donkere Gaard 11
Donkere Gaard 8
Janskerkhof 17a
‘t Wed 3a
Trans 10
Oudegracht 158
Phone
030 2667999
030 2368848
030 2322895
030 2343406
030 2319659
030 2321679
030 2302470
030 2310100
(Chipknip only!)
030 2303030
Apart from this list there are many more places in the vicinity of the workshop venue.
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Programme EMLAR X April 14-16, 2015
Monday, April 14th
9.30 – 10.15
Registration
Location
Next to room 0.06
10.15 – 10.30 Welcome (director UiL OTS Prof. dr. Henriëtte de Swart) KNG 80, 0.06
10.30 – 11.15 Tom Roeper
KNG 80, 0.06
11.15 – 11.45 Coffee break
11.45 – 12.30 Annemarie Kerkhoff
KNG 80, 0.06
12.30 – 13.15 Paula Fikkert
KNG 80, 0.06
13.15 – 14.30 Lunch break
14.30 – 16.30 Tutorial Session I
16.30 – 18.00 Poster session and drinks
Trans 10, 0.07
Tuesday, April 15th
9.00 – 9.45
Petra Hendriks
KNG 80, 0.06
9.45 – 10.30
Marianne Pouplier
KNG 80, 0.06
10.30 – 11.00 Coffee break
11.00 – 13.00 Tutorial session II
13.00 – 14.30 Lunch break
14.30 – 16.30 Tutorial Session III
16:45 - 17:30 Sabine Hunnius
17.30 – 19.00 Free time
19.00
Workshop dinner
See below
Wednesday, April 16th
9.30 – 10.15
Emmanuel Dupoux
10.15 – 11.00 Silvina Montrul
KNG 80, 0.06
KNG 80, 0.06
11.00 – 11.30 Coffee break
11.30 – 12.15 Marianne Gullberg
KNG 80, 0.06
12.15 – 12.30 Poster prize and closing
KNG 80, 0.06
KNG=Kromme Nieuwegracht
Address of the restaurant: Super House. Admiraal Helfrichlaan 56-60, 3527KV Utrecht
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ABSTRACTS
Talks
Reverse engineering early language acquisition in infants
Emmanuel Dupoux
École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , Paris
Human infants learn spontaneously and effortlessly the language(s) spoken in their environments,
but we still have a very poor understanding of the mechanisms underlying this feat. Here, I will show
that algorithms from Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology can help to shed light on
this problems, if they are cast within the framework of multilevel unsupervized learning. I will
illustrate the notion of learning synergies through several studies on the discovery of phonetic and
lexical units from speech (both modeling and experimental), and discuss the idea that studying the
human infant can help us understand what the nature of language learning is.
Investigating the acquisition of phonological representations
Paula Fikkert
Radboud University Nijmegen
In this talk I will present an overview of several studies we have carried out in the Baby Research
Center in Nijmegen to study the acquisition of various phonological contrasts by Dutch children,
using evidence from infant speech perception, word recognition and word production in the second
and third year of life.
One important asymmetry that has caused major misunderstandings in the field of phonological
acquisition is the gap between children’s knowledge as displayed in perception experiments and the
knowledge children bring to the task of language production. For example, while children by the end
of their first year of life show knowledge of the sound system of their native language (they seem to
know the speech sounds of their language, its phonotactics, stress pattern, etc.), it takes them quite
some time before they show that same knowledge in their own productions. Infant speech
perception researchers have therefore claimed that perception research provides a better way of
tapping children’s grammatical knowledge.
The situation is even more complex: Infants show improved sensitivity to native language contrasts in
their first year of life (e.g., Kuhl et al. 2006). However, they show decreased sensitivity to the same
contrasts in word-learning experiments in the beginning of the second year of life (e.g., Stager &
Werker 1997), although they are still able to discriminate these contrasts in other tasks. This suggests
that next to the discrimination of sound contrasts in the pre-lexical stage, in the lexical stage of
development another level of perception develops which ignores many phonetic details. We assume
that discrimination is based on phonetic properties while word comprehension involves matching
those properties to stored phonological representations of words in the mental lexicon. The reduced
sensitivity to certain contrasts in word learning might be caused by the nature of early lexical
phonological representations.
On the assumption that children use the same lexical phonological representations for word
comprehension and word production, we expect to find similar problems in both areas: contrasts
that are difficult in comprehension (and hence affect their representation) should also cause
problems in production. We show that this is indeed the case. Under such an account there are no
major asymmetries between perception and production: both are tightly connected.
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More than handwaving: What gesture analysis reveals
about acquisition and bilingualism
Marianne Gullberg
Lund University
We all gesture when we speak and we coordinate speech and gestures in sophisticated, culture- and
language-specific ways with contextual variation. Although communication and linguistic behavior is
embodied and bi-modal, studies of adult language acquisition and bilingualism generally ignore
gestures, or see them merely as compensatory devices of little theoretical interest. However,
contemporary gesture studies show gestures to be tightly linked to language and speech and to be
implicated in all levels of online language use. In this talk will briefly review two theoretical domains:
(1) the properties of learner varieties, and (2) crosslinguistic influence. The first set of studies targets
discourse coherence in learner varieties. I will show that gestures can help clarify the interplay
between interactive pressures (e.g., the need to be comprehensible) and cognitive factors (e.g., the
linguistic development of the pronominal system) that shape such varieties. The second set of
studies focuses on crosslinguistic influences in event representations (what information is selected
for expression and how it is expressed). I highlight some of the methodological and theoretical
challenges of looking at acquisition and bilingualism bi-modally and outline why I nevertheless think
it is important to do so.
Referential choice across the lifespan: why speakers produce ambiguous pronouns
Petra Hendriks
University of Groningen
In this talk, I will discuss several production studies that were carried out with various groups of
native speakers of Dutch to determine whether these speakers egocentrically base their referential
choices on the preceding linguistic discourse or also take into account the perspective of a
hypothetical listener. These studies used picture-based stories featuring two referents of the same
gender. This task allows us to look at referential choice at various points in the discourse in a fairly
structured way and makes it possible to look at correlations of these choices with e.g. workng
memory capacity, inhibition skills and Theory of Mind abilities. I will discuss the findings for 4- to 7year-old children, young adults, elderly adults (Hendriks, Koster & Hoeks, in press), and 6- to 12-yearold children with Autism Spectrum Disorders or adhd (Kuijper, Hartman & Hendriks, in prep.)
Reference: Petra Hendriks, Charlotte Koster & John Hoeks (in press). Referential choice across the
lifespan: Why children and elderly adults produce ambiguous pronouns. Language, Cognition and
Neuroscience (formerly Language and Cognitive Processes).
Infants' actions broaden their minds. Using eye-tracking and EEG to study the effects of
action experience on early social-cognitive development.
Sabine Hunnius
Radboud University Nijmegen
From the first days of life, infants watch their environment and the people acting in it. Although the
actions they observe form a continuous, intricate stream of complex information, infants show
indications of understanding and predicting other people’s actions. However, how exactly infants
come to make sense of actions they observe is still only fragmentarily understood. In this talk, I will
discuss how methods like eye-tracking and EEG can be used to study early social-cognitive
development. I will describe different mechanisms that are thought to play a role in infants’
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emerging understanding of others’ actions. In particular, I will present evidence which suggests the
importance of infants’ own active action experience for their action understanding.
Distributional learning in infants at family risk of dyslexia
Annemarie Kerkhoff
Utrecht University
Adults and children with dyslexia may have problems in domains other than reading and writing,
including morphosyntax and motor skills. It has been argued that a general deficit in procedural or
distributional learning may account for their difficulties within the language and motor domain.
Work from the Utrecht babylab has focused on children with a family risk (FR) of developing dyslexia,
i.e. children with a dyslexic parent. Using traditional behavioural methods such as the headturn
preference procedure and visual fixation, distributional learning was tested in FR infants.
Results show that these infants are less able to learn from distributional cues, affecting both
phonological and grammatical categorisation, and the detection of grammatical relations in an
artificial language. These results will be discussed in relation to the procedural deficit hypothesis.
Key Methodological Considerations When Working with Heritage Speakers
Silvina Montrul
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The number of heritage languages and dialects, the different types of heritage language
communities, and the inherent individual variation in heritage speakers’ proficiency within a
language, from family to family, from community to community, and from language to language in
the opportunities for learning and using heritage languages present serious challenges for
comparative research. In this talk I will address common dilemmas when studying the acquisition of
heritage languages. One is deciding the ideal baseline group against which we evaluate the linguistic
behavior of heritage speakers. Second, describing thoroughly the heritage speakers’ characteristics
and level of proficiency in the heritage language, including their literacy skills, becomes essential.
Decisions must also be made regarding the most appropriate approach—bilingual or unilingual—to
address the research questions, as well as the tasks and instruments to elicit data. Finally, individual
variability— a hallmark of heritage speaker groups— must be presented and interpreted so that
individual variation comes to light.
The temporal structure of speech
Marianne Pouplier
LMU Munich
In this talk, we will consider the progress that has been made in recent years in research on
articulatory timing of consonant sequences. This will include an introduction to Articulatory
Phonology which provides a useful framework for systematizing observations on the temporal
organization of speech and a model for how this organization could be planned and learned. Over the
last years one strand of our research has used the gestural model to investigate cross-linguistically
articulatory correlates of syllable structure. Articulatory Phonology has made very specific claims on
how languages exploit in their syllabic structure general principles of
movement coordination. These same general principles are also hypothesized to be a major factor in
phonological acquisition. While there is some support for this, there seems to exist a wider range of
timing patterns than originally envisioned both within a single language as much as between
languages. We have proposed that there is an intricate interaction
between the general timing pattern employed by a language and it phonotactic typology.
Methodological emphasis will be on articulography (EMA) data and we will also take a brief look at
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the freely distributed computational implementation of the gestural model, TADA, which provides a
useful tool for hypothesis testing and articulatory synthesis.
There are no Methods, Only Theories
Tom Roeper
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
First we will ask the question: what are methods? The broad answer will be: there Are no methods,
only theories. That is, every experimental shift in pragmatics or Organization has theoretical issues
hidden in it which we should strive to articulate. In fact the modern interest in pragmatics reveals
many perspectives that apply Directly to the pragmatic logic of experimental scenarios.
An example will be the role of Partition in how a context is conceived of and its Relation to the set of
actions, characters, and objects presented in a scenario. A Second example is the role of Filler
sentences. How exactly are they supposed to Affect the answers we anticipate?
The second half of the talk will be devoted to an effort to articulate a set of Principles that lie within
the techniques that Jill deVilliers and I have developed In studying how children acquire long-distance
movement. The importance of Having two narrative themes, with different pragmatic momentum,
where only The least likely is favored by the grammar of critical sentences, will be presented With a
discussion of critical examples and the process of scenario-building.
Tutorials
Articulography: Carstens Medizinelektronik & Hayo Terband (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to 3D Electromagnetic Articulography or EMA as it is currently used
in spoken language research. EMA is a kinematic tracking technique to measure articulatory
movements. A set of transmitter coils produces a magnetic field that generates currents in tiny
sensors placed on the surface of the articulators. As the sensors move through the field, they are
tracked by computer. In the first hour we will demonstrate the procedure from set up to
measurement together with the accompanying software and discuss the ins and outs of the
experimental setup. In the second hour, participants will get hands-on experience with data analysis
and we will give some theoretical background on the different measures and some examples of how
they can be used to study speech and language development. If you have specific questions, please
mail them in advance (h dot r dot terband at uu dot nl).
CHILDES: Jacqueline van Kampen (UU)
This workshop will introduce you into CHILDES, a system for sharing and studying child language
databases. We will discuss its history and success, and then demonstrate the transcription tools and
conventions (including how to work with video). Finally, we will focus on the tools for the analysis of
CHILDES data. If you have specific questions, please mail them in advance (Jacqueline dot
vanKampen at let dot uu dot nl).
Computational Methods: Christina Bergmann (Radboud University)
Finding recurring patterns in speech is a fundamental ability for children acquiring their first
language. This ability relies on statistical learning. Insights in the workings of this mechanism in
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children, however, are hard to obtain, because we only have indirect evidence of internal processes.
Computational models allow us to study learning in greater detail than child studies. Additionally,
simulations do not suffer the time constraints present in child studies. In this workshop we will
investigate the ability to find patterns using data from actual child experiments. We will replicate
findings from child studies using a recent model of statistical learning.
Participants will get hands-on experience with the use of the programming language Python, a high
level scripting language ideally suitable for both beginners and advanced scientific computing. At the
end of the workshop, participants will have built a working model and thus gained insight into the
possibilities and limitations of computational modeling in child language research.
Eye Tracking: Reading: Iris Mulders (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to the the eye-tracking methodology as it is currently used in
reading research. In the first part, we will discuss the basics of the methodology, Dos and Don'ts
concerning stimulus design and analysis, and well-known eye-tracking measures in reading, like first
fixation, regression path, total reading time etc: how do we compute these measures, and how are
they interpreted? In the second part of the workshop, we will look at some data to lend more
concreteness to these issues.
Eye Tracking: Visual World Paradigm: Pim Mak (UU)
This workshop will introduce you to the Visual World Paradigm as it is currently used in
psycholinguistic research. In a typical VWP experiment participants listen to sentences or a short
discourse while looking at a scene (often a cartoon-like picture) on a computer screen while their eye
fixations are monitored. The method has been shown to be sensitive to various language processes,
ranging from auditory word recognition to grammatical ambiguity resolution (and beyond).
It has the important advantage that it provides clues about what happens prior to a critical word or
sentence region. Another advantage is that this technique can provide a relatively direct insight into
the interpretations listeners assign to the language perceived, which in reading-based methods can
only be assessed indirectly. Furthermore, many interesting questions about language comprehension
can only be answered by “situating” language within a real-world context. Finally, the visual world
paradigm can be relatively easily applied with individuals of all ages and competences. However, as
in reading research, it is not always easy to link the eye-movements patterns of your participants to
higher cognitive functions such as language. In the light of this more general debate, we will discuss
issues concerning experimental design, data collection and statistical analysis, which will be
illustrated with data from recent experiments in our lab. These experiments cover a range of topics,
including verb semantics, the processing of noun gender, the processing of causal relations and
discourse coherence.
ERP: Titia van Zuijen (UvA) & Jos van Berkum (UU)
In this tutorial we will talk about EEG: what is it, where does it comes from, and how do you get to an
ERP. The scalp-recorded EEG, a real-time reflection of neuronal activity, is one of the tools we can
use to study the machinery behind language processing and language acquisition. In this tutorial,
we’ll look at what we can do with this research tool, as well as what the constraints are.
In the first hour, Jos van Berkum will discuss some of the general pro’s and con’s of using EEG in
psycholinguistic research, including the types of inferences one can and cannot draw from ERP data
(cf. a tutorial chapter in Van Berkum, 2004, downloadable here). In the second hour, Titia van Zuijlen
will tell you about the ins and outs of using EEG in language acquisition research, a field in which – as
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one can imagine – the use of EEG is quite challenging. She will explain what ERPs can tell us about
brain function with a focus on the mismatch negativity (MMN) and give some theoretical background
on what it may measure and some examples of how it can be used. She will also talk about infant ERP
research and which methodological challenges you will meet when you are interested in using the
MMN as a tool for investigating speech perception in infants.
If you have specific burning questions about general or acquisition-specific EEG issues, don’t hesitate
to mail the relevant tutor; if you do this in time, we can see if we can address them in our session.
LENA (Language Environment Analysis) and the Analysis of Spontaneous Speech: Nada Vasic &
Merel Maslowski (UvA/Belgrade)
In our tutorial we will give an overview of the Language ENvironment Analysis system (LENA) and its
application in early screening, research and treatment of language delays and disorders. We will then
focus on its use in research in the light of our current project which is a longitudinal study of
language development in a triplet growing up in a bilingual Dutch-Portuguese environment (Dutch
dominant language). We will use real data to explain how LENA software works, what it generates
and what can be done with the information it provides. The participants in the tutorial will also be
given a chance to work with the data in order to better understand the many possibilities LENA offers
in terms of automatization of spontaneous speech analysis.
Multilevel Analysis: Huub van den Bergh (UU)
Many datasets a kind of natural hierarchy exists. For instance, repeated measurements are in fact
measurements within subjects, or, to give another example, students are nested within classes which
themselves are nested within schools. This nesting of observations have been an enormous problem
for data analysis; in the first example both the variance within subjects (between measurements) and
between subjects have to be estimated simultaneously. In the second example the differences within
classes (between students) and between classes (within schools) as well as the variance between
schools have to be estimated. Failing to do so always results in an underestimation of the total
variance, and therefore the null hypothesis will be rejected too easily.
Today the magic words are ‘multilevel analysis’. Multilevel analysis can be carried out in SPSS. In this
hands-on tutorial the principles of multilevel analysis will be dealt with and participants should be
able to carry out (simple) multilevel analysis afterwards. However, the tutorial is only open to
participants who have some knowledge of statistical testing (i.e. they should know concepts like
variance, null hypothesis and testing statistics (t, F, χ2).
Preferential Listening/Looking: Annemarie Kerkhoff & Maartje de Klerk (UU)
In this tutorial, we’ll first provide a background on the methodology of preferential listening and
looking by discussing the designs as well as different studies that have used these methods.
After the introduction, we’ll run actual experiments in the Babylab to show you what equipment and
which skills are needed to run thse experiments. We’ll also show you clips of babylab experiments
from our research project to demonstrate the ins and outs of subject/data inclusion and exclusion
and the reliability of coding the experiments. Both the first part, theoretical in nature, and the
second part, the hands on approach, should lead to understanding of Babylab experiments.
PRAAT: Willemijn Heeren (Leiden University)
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In this tutorial you will learn the basics about how to use the program Praat (Boersma & Weenink,
2014) for speech analysis and speech manipulation. Part of the tutorial will consist of hands-on
practice with the software.
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program].
Retrievable from http://www.praat.org/
SPSS: Roeland van Hout (Radboud University)
Using SPSS to produce a few statistics is different from handling complex data in a larger research
project. The data set can become too large to put all data in one file. Sometimes it is necessary to
import and export data from and to other sources. In other cases, a distinction needs to be made
between the levels of analysis. In this session four aspects of SPSS data handling and analysis will be
dealt with:
1. Why keeping syntax? The window system in SPSS has many advantages. Using ‘old-fashioned’
syntax seems to have the advantage that more procedures and more options are available. However,
an essential difference is that by using syntax you can save en redo the (complex) operations
required to get the statistical analyses done.
2. Why using different files? In a larger research project you may collect so many data that they need
to be split into different files. How should you do that and how can you use the function merge?
Another option is to apply the exchange (import/export) facilities, for instance with EXCEL.
3. How to switch between speakers and occurrences? In dealing with a corpus, the basic level of
handling data is represented by the occurrences of the linguistic phenomenon to be analyzed.
Nevertheless, it is often necessary to calculate scores on the level of the speakers or participants.
This level switch can be handled by using the function of aggregate.
4. How to change the structure of the data matrix? For frequency analysis, it is good to know what
the weight function may do, for reliability analysis you need sometimes to transpose your matrix
structure, and it may happen that you need to repeat an analysis for different groups. How useful are
options like weight, transpose, and split?
This list can be expanded by implementing questions of the participants, including questions about
specific statistical procedures and techniques. When you have questions about SPSS, please mail
them: hout at let dot ru dot nl.
Statistics with R: Hans Rutger Bosker (UU)
This workshop will introduce the R programming environment for statistical analysis. Contrary to
SPSS which is procedure-oriented (commands are verbs, e.g. “compute”), R is object-oriented
(objects are nouns, e.g. “factor”). In this workshop, we will try to ease the learning curve of using R
for your data analysis. Experience with statistical software is NOT required! We will use data
simulation as well as real data sets, to explore topics like t-tests, χ2 tests, and regression. We will also
show how R produces publication-quality figures.
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Poster Session Abstracts
LANGUAGE DOMINANCE IN CHILD BILINGUALISM: EFFECTS ON NARRATIVE PRODUCTION AND
SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY
Maria Andreou1, Ianthi M. Tsimpli1&2
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki¹ & University of Reading2
Aims: to investigate the role of language dominance in Greek-German bilingual typically developing
8-10 year-old children and the implications it has on syntax and reference tracking in connected
discourse in the weaker language; more specifically, to investigate the effects of language dominance
on performance in syntactic vs. interface phenomena and the role of priming in connected discourse.
Variables: (independent) dominance, type of linguistic phenomenon. Dependent variables: telling vs.
retelling effects on the above phenomena.
Methodology: A vocabulary production task (Vogindroukas et al. 2009) was used as an independent
measure of language proficiency. Narrative production is elicited with storytelling and retelling; the
main aim is to investigate the role of priming (in the story retell mode) in the use of referential forms
such as definite and indefinite DPs, overt and null pronouns and clitics. In previous studies, children
have been reported to improve in terms of story structure and referential functions of story
characters in the retelling compared to the telling mode (Schneider & Dubé 1997, 2005). Four stories
of the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI) were developed in Greek in order to test the
retelling condition (Schneider & Dubé 2005). Finally, biographical data from all children elicited
through a detailed questionnaire, allow us to determine age of onset, continuity of exposure to each
language and input measures.
Results: Our preliminary analysis of the data indicates that children perform better in qualitative
(reference tracking) and quantitative (length of narrative) measures in the retelling condition.
Vocabulary measures seem to correlate with narrative production both in qualitative and
quantitative terms.
References
Alloway, T. P. 2007. Automated Working Memory Assessment. London: Harcour Assessment.
Pickering, S. J. & S. E. Gathercole 2001. Working Memory Test Battery for Children (WMTB-C). UK:
The Psychological Corporation.
Schneider, P. & R. V. Dubé 2005. Story presentation effects on children’s retell content. American
Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 14, 52-60.
Vogindroukas, I., A. Protopapas & G. Sideridis 2009. Experiment on the Expressive Vocabulary
(Δοκιμασία εκφραστικού λεξιλογίου) (Greek version of Renfrew Word Finding Vocabulary Test).
Chania, Crete: Glafki.
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ARE TRANSPARENT MORPHOSYNTACTIC STRUCTURES EASIER TO ACQUIRE THAN NONTRANSPARENT MORPHOSYNTACTIC STRUCTURES?
Lissan Taal – Apelqvist
University of Amsterdam – Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication
Key words: transparency, language learnability, longitudinal, foreign language acquisition, written
data
Focus
This project focuses on the learnability of languages by testing the hypothesis that transparent
languages are more learnable than non-transparent languages (Hengeveld, 2011).
Hengeveld (2011) provides a list of non-transparent properties, with which he operationalizes the
degree of transparency in a language. The extent to which these properties are present in a language
indicates the degree of its transparency1 versus its opacity.
Research question
With the focus on morphosyntactic structures, this project sets out to answer the question: ‘does the
transparency of morphosyntactic structures play an essential role for the learnability of these
structures? The operationalized question is:
Research method
In order to investigate the correlation between transparency and learnability in the area of
morphosyntax, the following research design has been constructed:
A longitudinal study will be conducted, with three data collecting moments during the first 1.5 year
of the second language acquisition.
Written elicited data from first year university students studying a foreign language will be collected
Three eliciting tests are designed for each testing moment
The tests display different degrees of steered production and meta linguistic knowledge.
Vocabulary size tests function as benchmarks for the general level of command of the L2
Three languages have been selected:
1.
A group of learners with a fairly transparent native language studying an opaque language
(Indonesian → Dutch)
2.
Two groups of learners with an opaque native language studying another opaque language
(Dutch → Swedish; Swedish → Dutch)
3.
A group of learners with an opaque native language studying a fairly transparent language
(Dutch → Indonesian)
Pilot study
15
Pilot studies have been carried out in the beginning of 2014 at the Universities in Stockholm and
Amsterdam (group 2). Pilots on the two other locations will be carried out in April 2014. Small
samples of the four tests comprised in the pilot study will be included in the poster presentation as
well as interesting findings so far.
DO PROSODIC AND GESTURES FACILITATE EARLY DETECTION OF IRONY?
Santiago González-Fuente1; Pilar Prieto2,1
1
Department of Translation and Language Sciencies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
2
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats
santiago.gonzalez@upf.edu; pilar.prieto@upf.edu
Previous research focused on childrens’ ability to comprehend ironic remarks has demonstrated that
it is around 6 years old that children begin to appreciate that the speaker’s belief and intent are
different to the literal meaning of the remark (e.g., Ackerman, 1982, 1983; Dews et al., 1996;
Nakassis & Snedeker, 2002; Harris & Pexman, 2003; Climie & Pexman, 2008). It has also been shown
that listeners consider different sources of information in addition to the linguistic characteristics of
the sentence in order to determine whether the remark is intended as literal or ironic, namely
contextual factors and prosody. Regarding tone of voice, many researchers have explored children’s
use of intonation for detecting or understanding irony, but results have been contradictory. Whereas
some studies have found that intonation does facilitate six year olds’ irony comprehension (e.g. De
Groot et al. 1995; Keenan and Quigley 1999), other studies have reported no-facilitation effects of
intonation in the ironic comprehension of even eight and ten year olds (Winner et al. 1987).
Moreover, other studies have reported that six years olds make Little use of intonation compared
with old children (eight and up) and adults (Ackerman, 1983; Winner & Leekam, 1991; Sullivan et al.
1995; Demorest et al. 1984). Yet little is known about the potential effectiveness of gestural cues in
the early detection of irony. Research on the understanding of verbal irony in adults have shown that
listeners use specific prosodic modulations (e.g., Bryant, 2010) and gestural markers (e.g., Attardo et
al., 2003, 2011, Caucci et al. 2013, González-Fuente et al. submitted) to convey information in order
to facilitate the ironic interpretation, even in the absence of pragmatic information.
This paper is aimed to fill a research gap regarding the contribution of these information sources to
the childrens’ processing and understanding of verbal irony by experimentally testing the interplay
between contextual and prosodic/visual cues in the processing and understanding of verbal irony.
Sixty subjects (30 5-years and 30 8-years children) participated in a perception experiment in which
they were audiovisually presented with a set of positive or negative situations (i.e. that favored a
literal or ironic interpretation of a target sentence) followed by a target sentence performed in three
different conditions, namely (1) in a sincere way, (2) in an ironic way with no marked prosody nor
gestures (i.e. emotionless, as it is called in Attardo et al. 2003) (3) in an ironic way with marked
prosody and gestures (i.e. to highlighte the contrast between the literal meaning of the sentence and
the actual intention of the speaker). We measured all participants’ interpretations of the target
sentences and also children’s eye gaze and response latencies as they made their interpretations.
Results are currently being analyzed, and we expect that the presence of marked prosody and
gestures will facilitate the processing and understanding of verbal irony, both in 5 years and in 8years old children.
References
16
Ackerman, B. P. (1982). Contextual integration and utterance interpretation: The ability of children
and adults to interpret sarcastic utterances. Child Development, 53: 1075–1083.
Ackerman, B. P. (1983). Form and function in children’s understanding of ironic utterances. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology, 35: 487–508.
Attardo, S., Eisterhold, J., Hay, J., Poggi, I. (2003). Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm.
International Journal of Humor Research, 16, 243-260.
Attardo, S., Pickering L., Baker A. (2011). Prosodic and multimodal markers of humor in conversation.
Pragmatics & Cognition, 19(2), 224-247.
Bryant, G.A. (2010). Prosodic contrasts in ironic speech. Discourse Processes, 47(7), 545-566.
Caucci, G. M., Kreuz, R. J. (2012). Social and paralinguistic cues to sarcasm. Humor: International
Journal of Humor Research, 25, 1-22.
Climie, E., & Pexman, P. (2008). Eye gaze provides a window on children's understanding of verbal
irony. Journal of Cognition and Development, 9, 257-285.
Demorest, A., Meyer, C., Phelps, E., Gardner, H., & Winner, E. (1984) “Words speak louder than
actions: understanding deliberately false remarks.” Child Devolopment, 55: 1527- 1534.
Dews, S., Winner, E., Kaplan, J., Rosenblatt, E., Hunt, M., Lim, K., McGovern, A., Qualter, A., &
Smarsh, B. (1996). Children’s understanding of the meaning and functions of verbal irony. Child
Development, 67: 3071–3085.
de Groot, A., Kaplan, J., Rosenblatt, E., Dews, S., & Winner, E. (1995) “Understanding versus
discriminating nonliteral utterances: evidence for a disassociation.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity,
10(4): 255-273.
González-Fuente, S., Zabalbeascoa, P., Prieto, P. (submitted 31 dec 2013). The role of discourse
context, prosody, and gesture in the detection of verbal irony. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.
Harris, M., & Pexman, P. M. (2003). Children’s perceptions of the social functions of verbal irony.
Discourse Processes, 36: 147–165.
Keenan, T. & Quigley, K. (1999) “Do young children use echoic information in their comprehension of
sarcastic speech? A test of echoic mention theory.” British Journal of Dev Psychology, 17: 83-96.
Nakassis, C., & Snedeker, J. (2002). Beyond sarcasm: Intonation and context as relational cues in
children’s recognition of irony. In A. Greenhill, M. Hughs, H. Littlefield, & H. Walsh (Eds.), Proceedings
of the 26th Boston University Conference on Language Development. (pp. 429–440). Somerville, MA:
Cascadilla Press.
Sullivan, K. Winner, E., & Hopfield, N. (1995) “How children tell a lie from a joke: the role of secondorder mental state attributions.” British J of Dev Psych, 13: 191-204.
Winner, E. Windmueller, G., Rosenblatt, E., Bosco, L., Best, E., & Gardner, H. (1987)“Making Sense of
Literal and Nonliteral Falsehood.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 2(1): 13-32.
Winner, E. & Leekam, S. (1991) “Distinguishing irony from deception: understanding the speaker’s
second-order intention.” British J of Dev Psych, 9: 257-270.
17
THE ROLE OF GESTURAL AND SPEECH CUES IN CHILDREN’S UNDERSTANDING OF
UNCERTAINTY
Iris Hübscher1, Núria Esteve-Gibert1, Alfonso Igualada Pérez1, Pilar Prieto2,1
1
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
2
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
Uncertainty can be encoded through various verbal and nonverbal means which vary depending
on the language. It can be expressed lexically (mental state verbs, modal adverbs; e.g. in Catalan
potser ‘maybe’), and grammatical particles (e.g. Japanese kana), as well as through intonation
(prosody) and gesture cues such as shoulder shrugging, squinting, stretching of the lips, head
movements and eyebrow raising (e.g. Borràs-Comes et al., 2011; Swerts & Krahmer, 2005). While a
considerable number of studies have focused on children’s understanding of pragmatic meanings
such as certainty and uncertainty in relation to their cognitive development as stipulated by the
theory of mind (ToM, i.e. the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs and desires to oneself and to
others (e.g. Moore et al., 1990; Matsui et al., 2009), little is known about the role of prosodic and
gesture cues in the development of the infants’ ability to understand uncertainty. Other studies
investigating infants’ comprehension of complex meanings involving ToM abilities, such as disbelief,
showed that facial gestures provide children with scaffolding for the linguistic meaning of disbelief
(see Armstrong, Esteve-Gibert & Prieto 2014).
The aim of our study is to investigate how gestural patterns interact with lexical and prosodic cues in
the development of children’s ability to understand the pragmatic meaning of uncertainty. The
following research questions will be addressed: (1) are gestures scaffolding children’s understanding
of uncertainty more than the lexical cues? (2) are gestures scaffolding children’s understanding of
uncertainty more than prosodic cues? (3) how does their ability to understand the pragmatic
meaning of uncertainty relate to their mind-reading abilities? In alignment with Armstrong et al.’s
(2014) results, we hypothesise that facial gestures might give support to the understanding of the
linguistic meaning.
Sixty 3-, 4- and 5-year old Catalan-monolingual children are currently being recruited for participation
in two experiments (Exp. 1 and Exp. 2). In addition, a classical false-belief task (i.e. Sally-Ann task,
Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985) to evaluate their ToM abilities is conducted. In both experiments,
children watch a powerpoint presentation in which two pairs of twins have to guess a thirdcharacter’s favourite colour/fruit/sport/food/instrument. One of the twins knows the answer very
well and the other one does not. Children have to guess the uncertain twin. The powerpoint is
presented in three different versions: audio-only (AO), video only (VO), and audio-visual (AV). In Exp.
1, the materials contained lexical cues to uncertainty (modal verbs), which are accompanied by
gestures and facial expressions cueing uncertainty in the VO and AV conditions. In Exp. 2 the
materials contain no specific lexical cues of uncertainty, but are marked with prosodic cues in the AO
conditions; again, visual cues are added in the VO and AV conditions. The materials for both
experiments were selected from the utterances collected from a Discourse Completion Task, which
was run with 6 Catalan-speaking adults. Partial results of the two experiments and the ToM task are
currently being analyzed and will be presented at the poster session.
References
Armstrong, M., Esteve-Gibert, N., & Prieto, P. (2014). The acquisition of multimodal cues to disbelief.
Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2014. ISSN:2333-2042.
Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M. & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind”?
Cognition, 21 (1), 37-46.
18
Borràs-Comes et al. (2011). Perceiving uncertainty: facial gestures, intonation, and lexical choice. 2n
Conference on Gesture and Speech in Interaction. Universität Bielefeld: Bielefeld, Sep 5-7. [Oral]
Matsui et al. (2009). Understanding of speakers certainty and false-belief reasoning: a comparison of
Japanese and German preschoolers. Developmental Science, 12 (4), 602-613.
Moore, C., Pure, K. & Furrow, D. (1990). Children’s understanding of the modal expression of speaker
certainty and uncertainty and its relation to the development of a representational theory mind.
Child Development, 61, 722-730.
Swerts, M. & Krahmer, E. (2005). Audiovisual prosody and feeling of knowing. Journal of Memory and
Language, 53, 81-94.
DO BEAT GESTURES HELP CHILDREN RECALL INFORMATION?
Alfonso Igualada1, Núria Esteve-Gibert1, Pilar Prieto2,1
1
Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain)
2
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
Speakers often use simple hand and body motions to accompany speech and that are typically
aligned with prosodic. Beat gestures are strongly correlated in speech with the presence of prosodic
acoustic cues of prominence (Krahmer & Swerts, 2007). In fact, beat gestures are found to have
similar functions as prosody, i.e. information highlighting (Loehr, 2012; Wagner, 2014). Moreover,
the presence of beat and iconic has been found to help adults to recall information (So, Chen-Hui &
Wei-Shan, 2012).
With respect to acquisition, gesture studies have found that gestures expressing semantic
information, such as iconic gestures, are related to the early acquisition of language and cognitive
abilities (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Goldin-Meadow, Cook & Mitchell, 2009; Tellier, 2008).
Much less is known about how beat gestures interplay with early cognitive abilities. So, et al. (2012)
found that while adults benefited from the presence of both iconic and beat gestures to recall words,
4 and 5-year-old children only benefited from the presence of iconic gestures, not from the presence
of beat gestures when having to recall. In this study, however, every word of the list was presented
with a beat gesture, and thus children could not perceive beat gestures as a prominent cue in
contrast to a less prominent cue. Moreover, the list of words was presented without a pragmatic
context. The aim of this study is to explore So et al’s (2012) results further and investigate whether
the presence of beat gestures in discourse helps to recall. Our hypothesis is that beat gestures will
parallel prosodic prominence and so children will benefit from the presence of beat gesture cues
when having to remember words in a list.
To investigate this research question, sixty 3-, 4-, and 5-year old Catalan-monolingual children
participated in our study. Children are presented a story about an elephant that enjoys travelling and
are asked to recall a list that the character has to do before travelling. Children are presented with
four trials (which consist of a list containing five items). Each trial consists of a list of five different
disyllabic nouns of the same semantic category, presented in two different conditions in a withinsubjects design (2 trials per condition), namely a ‘no-beat condition’, and a ‘beat condition. In order
to control for serial sequential effects (i.e. first and the last elements of a list are easier to remember,
e.g. Lewkowicz, 2013), the beat/no-beat conditions only contrast the noun in the middle position
(i.e., in the beat condition, only the third noun in the lists were highlighted with a beat gesture).
19
Results are currently being analyzed, and we expect children to remember significantly better the
noun in the middle position of the list in the beat condition than in the no-beat condition.
References
Goldin-Meadow, S., Cook, S.W., and Mitchell, Z.A. (2009). Gesturing gives children new ideas about
math. Psychological Science, 20 (3), 267–272.
Iverson, J.M. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture paves the way for language development.
Psychological Science, 16 (5), 367–371.
Krahmer, E., & Swerts,M. (2007). Effects of visual beat gestures on prosodic prominence:
Acousticanalyses, auditory perception and visual perception. Journal of Memory and Language, 57,
396-414.
Lewkowicz, D.J. (2013). Development of ordinal sequence perception in infancy. Developmental
Science, 16 (3), 352-364.
Loehr, D. (2012) Temporal, structural, and pragmatic synchrony between intonation and gesture.
Laboratory Phonology, 3(1), 71-89.
So, W.C., Chen-Hui, C.S. & Wei-Shan J.L. (2012). Mnemonic effect of iconic gesture and beat gesture
in adults and children: Is meaning in gesture important for memory recall? Language and Cognitive
Processes, 27(5), 665-681.
Tellier, M. (2008). The effect of gestures on second language memorization by young children.
Gesture, 8(2), 219_235.
Wagner, P. (2014). Gesture and speech interaction: An overview. Speech Communication 57, 209232.
THE ACQUISITION OF DOUBLE OBJECT CONSTRUCTIONS IN L3 ENGLISH
Ainara Imaz Agirre
University of the Basque Country
The present study examines the acquisition of double object constructions (DOCs) (John gave Mary a
book) by Basque/Spanish learners of English as an L3. Previous research on the topic by L1 Japanese
and Korean second language (L2) learners of English shows L1 influence and proficiency effects
(Whong-Barr & Schwartz, 2002; Oh & Zubizaretta, 2006). Research on Romance languages also
reports proficiency effects and higher morphosyntactic than semantic accuracy (Cuervo, 2007). The
three languages in this study, Basque, Spanish and English present two types of dative structures:
prepositional phrases (PPs) and DOCs. Basque DOCs are morphologically marked in the verb; in
Spanish DOCs are expressed by means of clitic doubling (Demonte, 1995) whereas English DOCs are
restricted by word order constraints. Semantically Basque objects could be interpreted as
benefactive, goal and source depending on the predicate and the context. The Spanish object can be
interpreted as recipient, source and possessor. DOCs in English show idiosyncratic restrictions, such
as morphophonological rules (which exclude most Latinate verbs) as well as language specific
semantic constraints.
20
The aim of the present study is to investigate whether the differences between the three languages
might impact the acquisition of English DOCs. Participants are expected to show positive transfer in
similar structures. Negative blocking effects are expected in non-comparable structures, but should
be overcome by increasing proficiency. Ninety (90) Basque/Spanish bilinguals learners of English
completed two online acceptability judgment tasks: a self-paced reading task and an auto-paced
reading task. Each task consisted of 24 PPs and 24 DOCs items and 48 fillers. Preliminary findings
show positive transfer in PPCs. Negative blocking effects are found in DOCs both in cross-linguistic
similar (i.e. possessor) and different (i.e. morphological) constraints. Interestingly, the difficulties
occur regardless of proficiency level.
References
Cuervo, M.C. (2007). Double objects in Spanish as a second language: Acquisition of morphosyntax
and semantics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29: 583-615.
Demonte, V. (1995). Dative alternation in Spanish. Probus, 7(1): 5-30.
Férnandez, B. & J. Ortiz de Urbina (2010). Datiboa hiztegian. Bilbao: University of the Basque
Country.
Odria, A. (2012). What lies behind differential object marking: A survey in Basque dialects.
Unpublished MA dissertation, University of the Basque Country.
Oh, E. & M.L. Zubizaretta (2006). The acquisition of goal and benefactive object constructions by L2
learners of English. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society,
(pp.241 - 253), Berkeley, CA.
Whong-Barr, M. & B.D. Schwartz (2002). Morphological and syntactic transfer in child L2 acquisition
of the English dative alternation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24: 579-616.
FACTORS AFFECTING AMBIGUOUS PRONOUN RESOLUTION AMONG GREEK-SPEAKING CHILDREN
Katsiperi Maria1 & Ianth M. Tsimpli1,2
1
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
2
University of Reading, UK
Background: The resolution of a referential form is a rather simple and automatic process when
there is feature overlap with only one other linguistic expression into the discourse (Arnold 2000 at
al.; Myers & O’ Brien 1998). However, in cases where more than one possible compatible antecedent
is available, the choice is not driven by the rules of grammar but is influenced by a variety of factors
(Papadopoulou et al. 2007 for Greek; Sorace & Filiaci 2006 for Italian, among others).
Aims: The study explores some of the factors that have been argued to influence this choice such as
[+/- definiteness] of the antecedents, their syntactic role and the form of the anaphoric expression
(null vs overt pronoun). It investigates whether and how these factors affect the process and the
interpretation of ambiguous subject pronouns in typically developing Greek-speaking children
attending primary school.
21
Variables: The independent variables of the study are type of anaphor (null vs overt), [ +/definiteness] of the antecedent in subject and object position and age of participants. The
dependent variables are the effects of these factors as they are manifested in reaction times and
choice of referent.
Method and Procedures: Two groups of 8 children each, 6-7 and 9-10 years old, participated in an
on-line self-paced listening task with picture verification. Participants heard a sentence containing
either a null or an overt pronoun. The possible antecedents were +/- definite, appearing in subject or
object position. Each sentence was segmented into 7 linguistic entities and the participants had to
pace themselves by pressing the “space” button. At the same time, they were looking at three
images on a computer’s screen, two depicting the possible antecedents and the other, a distractor
one. At the end of each sentence, participants indicated which picture matches the anaphoric form.
The experiment was generated by using the E-Prime 2.0 software. Participants’ response times in
milliseconds (ms) for each segment and choice of antecedent were measured.
Results: A preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the two groups of children exhibit similar
behavior towards the type of anaphoric form and +/- definiteness of the antecedent. It took longer
for both groups to process the overt pronoun than the null form. The two age groups reacted
similarly to the +/- definiteness conditions as well. An indefinite first-mentioned character in subject
position triggered their attention more than a definite one. What seems to differentiate the two
groups is the choice of antecedent. The younger children preferred significantly more often an
antecedent in object position across all conditions. The older children also favored an antecedent in
object position in the overt pronoun condition only, but preferred an antecedent in subject position
in sentences with a null referential form.
Conclusions: Both age groups showed some sensitivity to the marked conditions (overt pronoun,
indefinite subject). Coming to the choice of antecedent the younger children demonstrated a clear
preference for antecedents in object position whereas older children took into consideration the
syntactic function of the possible antecedent, performing in a more adult-like pattern. The
preference for object antecedents by the younger group may be facilitated and thus by driven by the
factor of accessibility between the referent and the antecedent (Gibson 1998).
References:
Arnold, J. E., Eisenband, G. J, Brown-Schmidt, S. & Trueswell, C. J (2000). The rapid use of gender
information: evidence of the time course of pronoun resolution from eyetracking. Cognition, 76, B13B26.
Myers, J. L., & O’Brien, E. J. (1998). Accessing the discourse representations during reading. Discourse
Processes, 26, 131-157.
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: The locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
Papadopoulou, D., Plemenou, E., Marinis, T., & Tsimpli, I. M. (2007). Pronoun ambiguity resolution:
evidence from adult and child Greek. Oral presentation at the Child Language Seminar Conference,
University of Reading.
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second
Language Research, 22, 339–368.
22
PROSODIC FOCUS MARKING IN BAI
Zenghui Liu1, Aoju Chen1,2 & Hans Van de Velde1
Utrecht University1, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics2
l.z.h.liu@uu.nl, aoju.chen@uu.nl, h.vandevelde@uu.nl
This study investigates prosodic marking of focus in Bai, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in the
Southwest of China, by adopting a semi-spontaneous experimental approach. Our data show that Bai
speakers increase the duration of the focused constituent and reduce the duration of the post-focus
constituent to encode focus. However, duration is not used in Bai to distinguish focus types differing
in size and contrastivity. Further, pitch plays no role in signaling focus and differentiating focus types.
The results thus suggest that Bai uses prosody to mark focus, but to a lesser extent, compared to
Mandarin Chinese, with which Bai has been in close contact for decades, and Cantonese, to which Bai
is similar in the tonal system.
References:
[1] 赵衍荪, 徐琳, 白语, 中国社会科学院, & 民族研究所. (1996).白汉词典四川民族出版社.
(Zhao, Xu, Bai-Chinese dictionary,1996)
[2] Allen, B. (2007). Bai dialect survey. SIL International,
[3] 艾磊, 苏玮雅, & 尹曼芬. (1997). 白语喜洲镇话声调的测试分析. 大理学院学报(社会科学版),
(Allen, Su and Yin, The experimental study on Xizhou Bai lexical tones, 1997)
[4] Vallduví, E., & Engdahl, E. (1996). The linguistic realization of information packaging. Linguistics,
34(3), 459-520.
[5] Lambrecht, K. (1996). Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental
representations of discourse referents Cambridge University Press.
[6] Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation Cambridge University Press.
[7] Hefright, B. E. (2011). Language Contact as Bilingual Contrast among Bái Language Users in
Jiànchuān County, China,
[8] Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology Cambridge University Press.
[9] 王蓓, 吐尔逊, 卡得, & 许毅. (2013). 维吾尔语焦点的韵律实现及感知. 声学学报, 38(1), 92-98.
(Wang, Tursun and Xu. Prosodic encoding and perception of focus in Uygur, 2013)
[10] Bruce, G. (1982). Textual aspects of prosody in swedish. Phonetica, 39(4-5), 274-287.
[11] Xu, Y. (1999). Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours. Journal of
Phonetics,27(1), 55-105.
[12] Jannedy, S. (2007). Prosodic focus in vietnamese. Interdisciplinary Studies on Information
Structure, 8, 209-230.
[13] Jannedy, S. (2008). The effect of focus on lexical tones in vietnamese. Experimental Linguistics
ExLing 2008, , 113.
[14] Wu, W. L., & Xu, Y. (2010). Prosodic focus in hong kong cantonese without post-focus
compression. Speech Prosody 2010,
[15] Kügler, F., & Skopeteas, S. (2007). On the universality of prosodic reflexes of contrast: The case
of yucatec maya.
[16] Gussenhoven, C. (2006). Yucatec maya tone in sentence perspective. Poster Presented at
LabPhon10, Paris,
[17] Gussenhoven, C., & Teeuw, R. (2008). A moraic and a syllabic H-tone in yucatec maya. Fonología
Instrumental: Patrones Fónicos y Variacion, , 49-71.
[18] 邓瑶, & 何稳菊. (2012). 云南大理喜洲白族居民语言生活调查. 民族翻译, 3, 017.
(Den and He. The language attitude survey on Bai in Xizhou, Dali. 2012)
23
[19] 徐琳. (2008). 大理丛书· 白语篇.
(Xu, The Dali series. Bai language. 2008)
[20] 赵燕珍. (2009). 赵庄白语参考语法,
[21] Boersma, P. (2002). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5(9/10),
341-345.
PROCESSING OBVIATION IN SPANISH
Rocío Romero Mérida
Utrecht University (The Netherlands), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)
Introduction: In some Romance languages and other languages like Icelandic or Russian, certain
embedded contexts require that the matrix and the embedded subject be disjoint in reference, as
shown in (1):
(1)
Ronaldo se enteró de que Messi no quería que jugase. (Spanish)
Ronaldoj heard that Messii didn’t want that pro*i/j played.3sg.pst.subj.
(‘Ronaldo heard that Messi didn’t want him to play’)
In Generative Grammar this restriction was labeled ‘Obviation’ (Chomsky, 1981). Obviation occurs in
very specific linguistic contexts like that in (1). In contexts like (2) there is no obviation and the matrix
and the embedded subjects can freely corefer:
(2)
Ronaldo se enteró de que Messi no sabía que jugase.
Ronaldoj heard that Messii didn’t know that proi/j played.3sg.pst.subj.
(‘Ronaldo heard that Messi didn’t know that he played.’)
The main question addressed in this paper is: does processing of (1) differ from (2)?
Background: According to the Primitives of Binding framework (Reuland, 2001, 2011) encoding a
dependency in the syntax module by an A-chain where one of the antecedents has been blocked is
“less costly” than establishing coreference when there are two possible antecedents in discourse.
Supporting experimental data was shown in Koornneef (2008).
Proposal: Processing an anaphoric dependency as in (1) where one antecedent is banned is less
costly, i.e. faster, than solving an anaphoric dependency in (2) where there are two competing
antecedents in discourse. We also propose that obviation occurs when the main predicate is
volitional but not epistemic (Kempchinsky, 2009), when there are sequence-of-tense restrictions
between clauses and subjunctive mood is obligatorily used in the embedded clause. Therefore, we
expect to find a difference in processing between complements to epistemic and volitional main
predicates.
Methods: Two self-paced reading experiments were carried out on Zep-software (Veenker, 2012).
Fifty-one native speakers of Spanish between 18-50 years old were studied.
Results: Results show that complements of volitional verbs like in (1) are often read faster than
complements of epistemic verbs (2). However, the discourse bias towards one of the readings might
24
affect processing time and thus, significant results may not show up. Moreover, results also show
that the grammatical number of the antecedents affects reading times for sentences like (2), but it
does not affect reading times for sentences like (1). It was shown that when the human language
processor subliminally considers an antecedent that is mismatched in number with pro longer
reading times are obtained, as compared to a sentence with two matching antecedents for pro that
share the same number.
Conclusion: An antecedent that is allowed by grammar interferes with the reader’s processing
resources, but an antecedent that is grammatically illegal does not modulate reading times.
Further research: This study is being extended to L2-acquisition addressing the following questions:
do L2ers show this difference in processing between (1) and (2)?
Research in L2-acquisition of structures similar to (1) and (2) have shown that purely syntactic
structures like (1), i.e. obligatory use of subjunctive embedded clauses with volitional verbs, are more
easily acquired/discriminated by L2 learners (Iverson, Kempchinsky and Rothman, 2008) and heritage
bilingual speakers (Montrul, 2005) compared to structures like (2) where the choice of indicative or
subjunctive depends on interpretive difference.
Selected references: Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. ●
Iverson, M., Kempchinsky, P. & Rothman, J. (2008). Interface Vulnerability and Knowledge of the
Subjunctive/Indicative Distinction with Negated Epistemic Predicates in L2 Spanish. EUROSLA
Yearbook, 8, 135-163. ● Kempchinsky, P. (2009). What can the subjunctive disjoint reference effect
tell us about the subjunctive? Lingua 119, 1788-1810. ● Koornneef. A, (2008). Eye-Catching
Anaphora. Utrecht: LOT Intemation Dissenation Series. ● Montrul, S. 2005. Second language
acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: Exploring some differences and
similarities. Second Language Research 21 (3), 199–249. ● Reuland, E. (2001). Primitives of Binding.
Linguistic Inquiry, pp. 439-492. ● Reuland, E. (2011). Anaphora and Language Design. Cambridge,
MA: MIT press. ● Veenker, T.J.G. (2012). The Zep Experiment Control Application (0.16.0) [Computer
software]. Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University.
IS THE 3rd PERSON SINGULAR FORM A REAL DEFAULT FORM IN THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH AS A
FIRST LANGUAGE?
Nuria Polo
UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)
Studies on the acquisition of the phonology of Spanish as a first language are scarce. Moreover,
research on the acquisition of Spanish has focused on morphological development. Authors claim a
piecemeal development of Spanish verbal morphemes. Specifically, it has been proposed that
singular forms overextend to plural forms, and 3th singular person is the default form (i.e. come
‘she/he eats’). The objective of this piece of work is to look deeper into the way that phonology and
morphology interact during the acquisition of Spanish. Within the framework of Prosodic Phonology,
this research looks into the development of verbal morphemes of the present tense expressed by
codas in Spanish (2nd sg come-s ‘you eat’, 1st pl come-mo-s ‘we eat’, and 3rd pl come-n ‘they eat’) to
ascertain if the phonological and prosodic restrictions impact on verbal morpheme development. The
data analyzed are from two monolingual Spanish–speaking children 1;7 to 2;7 years old, and Phon
software was used to do the analysis. Results show the expected interrelation between phonology
and morphology during acquisition and offer a possible explanation to the delayed development of
some verbal morphemes in Spanish, making use of the concepts such as phonological complexity.
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This piece of research argues that prosodic constraints on syllabic structure have a significant role in
the development of verbal morphology in Spanish as a first language.
References:
FREITAS, Maria João, Matilde MIGUEL y Isabel Hub FARIA (2001): “Interaction between prosody and
morphosyntax: plurals within codas in the acquisition of European Portuguese”. En: WEISSENBORN,
Jürgen y Barbara HÖHLE (eds.). Approaches to bootstrapping. Phonological, lexical, syntactic and
neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
45-57.
LLEÓ, Conxita (2006): “Early acquisition of nominal plural in Spanish”. Catalan journal of linguistics 5,
191-219.
SONG, Jae Y., Megha SUNDARA y Katherine DEMUTH (2009): “Phonological Constraints on Children's
Production of English Third Person Singular –s”. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
52 (3), 623-642.
PROCESSING OF PARTICLE PLACEMENT IN NORWEGIAN AS L1 AND L2
Silke Schunack
Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism
In this experiment I looked at the processing of particle verbs in Norwegian by native speakers and
non-native speakers with German as their L1. As in English, the particle of verbs like “to put on” or
“to pull down” can be placed either before or after the object NP in Norwegian, whereas in German
it only occurs in sentence final position after the object NP. According to Norwegian grammar books,
the position after the object NP is dispreferred after long objects.
In a 2x2 design, I contrasted the two positions of the particle (before vs. after the NP) with the length
of the object (short vs. long). The short object consisted of a single word – a determined NP, the long
object consisted of four words, an NP with two adjectives and a adjectival determiner.
Example:
Anders slipper inn hunden av medlidenhet.
(Anders lets in the dog out of compassion. Condition: short, before NP)
Anders slipper den våte, blinde hunden inn av medlidenhet.
(Anders lets the wet, blind dog in out of compassion. Condition: long, after NP)
32 native and 32 nonnative speakers were tested. The nonnative speakers had self-evaluated as at
least B2 level on the CERF. They completed a self-paced reading task and an acceptability
questionnaire.
If the position of the particle before the NP is actually the preferred one, this should be reflected in
shorter reading times compared to those conditions in which the particle is placed after the NP. If the
length of the object NP modulates this preference, it might only occur in the long conditions or even
26
more pronounced. If the German L2 speakers show any kind of transfer from their L1, they should
favor the conditions with the particle after the object NP.
In the offline task, the L1 group showed a strong preference for the position of the particle before
the object only for short objects. For long objects this preference was less pronounced. The L2 group
showed a general preference for the position of the particle before the object, but the length of the
object did not play any role.
In the self-paced reading task, an ANOVA was run on the region of interest defined by the object NP,
the particle and the following preposition. It revealed a significant interaction of group with position
in the F1 (1,62, F=5.27, p<0.05), but not in the F2 (1,46, F=2.78, p=0.1) for the short condition. The L1
group was significantly faster, if the particle was placed before the object NP than after. The L2 group
on the other hand was equally fast in both conditions. There was no significant interaction in neither
F1 nor F2 for the long condition. Both groups showed a tendency to read faster, if the particle came
before the object NP.
These findings do support the assumption of a preference for an early particle, but the length of the
object doesn’t seem to play a role.
ADULTS' AND CHILDREN'S INTERPRETATION OF ANAPHORIC SUBJECTS IN ITALIAN
Margreet Vogelzang
University of Groningen
Pronouns are a highly flexible means in language to refer to individuals that appear in the utterance
or the linguistic discourse. At the same time, they introduce potential ambiguity. Importantly, the
speaker should resolve the pronoun in the way the listener had intended, so that the speaker and the
listener will understand each other.
In Italian, contrary to e.g., English, a speaker can use either an overt pronoun, or a null pronoun (Ø)
as a subject anaphor. Generally, a null subject pronoun refers to the previous discourse topic (topic
continuation), whereas an overt subject pronoun refers to something other than the discourse topic
(topic shift; Carminati, 2002; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). Italian children that are in the process of
language acquisition have to learn these different interpretations. Besides discourse information, we
argue that perspective-taking (the listener taking the perspective of the speaker) also plays a role in
pronoun resolution.
To investigate how adult-like children are in their interpretation of subject pronouns in Italian, we
performed an experiment with 40 Italian adults and 54 Italian children (age 5-8). Using a referent
selection task, we investigated the interpretations of specific forms of the subject (a full NP such as
the hedgehog, a null subject pronoun, or an overt subject pronoun (‘lui’/he)).
Our auditory presented materials consisted of a linguistic context (e.g., The hedgehog has built a tree
house. Last night the hedgehog walked home through the forest with the mouse...) followed by a
test sentence (...while he/the hedgehog hurried himself along a dark trail), with all stimuli presented
in Italian. The two characters in the story were presented on the screen. These characters could be
selected as possible answers to an interpretation question following the story. The results show that
adult interpretations are in line with the results of Carminati (2002) and Sorace & Filiaci (2006): null
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subject pronouns generally refer to the discourse topic while overt subject pronouns can indicate a
topic shift. For an NP, adults selected topic continuation 98.9% of the time, for a null pronoun 85.1%
of the time, and for an overt pronoun 40.1% of the time (all comparisons between subject conditions
p < 0.001).
Children preferred topic continuation in 80.6% of the cases with a subject NP, 58.1% with a null
subject, and 52.0% with an overt subject. Statistical analysis showed that all comparisons between
subject conditions were significant (p < 0.01). Importantly, children interpreted a null subject
pronoun less often, but an overt object pronoun more often as a topic continuation than adults (p <
0.001). The finding that children and adults are less consistent in their interpretations of subject
anaphora than adults indicates that the intention of the speaker might not always be understood
correctly by a listener. We argue that in the case of anaphoric subjects, discourse information alone
is not sufficient for complete resolution. Thus, perspective-taking may also play an essential role in
pronoun resolution.
References
Carminati, M. N. (2002). The Processing of Italian Subject Pronouns (Doctoral dissertation). University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.
Sorace, A. & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second
Language Research, 22, 339-368.
THE ROLE OF INTONATION IN INFANTS’ SPEECH SEGMENTATION – IS HIGH PITCH A MORE SALIENT
CUE TO METRICAL PROMINENCE THAN DURATION AND INTENSITY? EVIDENCE FROM GERMAN 10MONTH-OLDS
Katharina Zahner
For infants, one of the first steps into their native language is to identify words in fluent speech – not
an easy task, since human speech lacks fully reliable cues to word boundaries. Segmenting the
continuous speech stream is indispensable for infants when forming their mental lexicon. While
adults can rely on lexical knowledge when segmenting fluent speech, children need to use various
other strategies: transitional probabilities of sounds (Mattys & Jusczyk 2001) and syllables (Saffran,
Newport & Aslin 1996), or context sensitive allophones (Jusczyk, Hohne & Bauman 1999). Infants
who are exposed to stress-timed languages also heavily rely on the stressed syllable (cued by
duration, intensity and often, but not always, pitch (Jessen, Marasek & Claßen 1995, Schneider &
Möbius 2007)) when identifying word onsets (Bartels, Darcy & Höhle 2009, Jusczyk, Houston &
Newsome 1999). In intonation languages, such as German, the actual type of pitch accent (and thus
the alignment of the pitch peak with respect to the stressed syllable) varies1, which suggests that the
position of the pitch peak does not unambiguously signal the position of the stressed syllable.
This variability in the position of the pitch peak with regard to the stressed syllable makes intonation
an interesting candidate for a word boundary cue. In this regard, by focusing on infants’ use of
metrical stress for segmentation, this dissertation investigates in a series of head turn preference
experiments (Fernald 1985) whether German infants' segmentation strategies are sensitive to the
1
Kohler (1991) distinguishes between early, medial and late peaks, which are described as H+L*, H* or L*+H in
the framework of autosegmental phonology (Baumann, Grice & Benzmüller 2001).
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position of the pitch peak relative to the stressed syllable. It is hypothesized that intonation strongly
influences infants’ speech segmentation (Braun, Pohl & Zahner 2014) and that high pitch is a more
salient cue to metrical prominence than other stress cues, such as intensity and duration (see Figure
1).
Figure 1: Perception of metrical prominence (dark-grey boxes display the real prosodic structure of
the word while light-grey boxes in the second line display the perceived stressed syllable)
When familiarizing 10 month old German infants with resynthesized trisyllabic pseudo-words, such
as Linuro ([li.ˈnuː.ro]), embedded in little passages, the position of the pitch peak will be
manipulated, resulting in two distinct accent types (H+L* vs. H*) and thus two different intonation
conditions. Half of the 10-month-olds will be familiarized with one of the two intonation conditions.
In the test phase, infants' attention to different disyllabic words, to which they are sensitive, is
examined, e.g. [ˈnuː.ro] for Linuro in the first experiment and [ˈliː.nu] for Linuro in the second
experiment. If high pitch is the most salient cue to metrical prominence, an effect of familiarity is
expected only in one of the two intonation conditions. In order to be able to focus on the role of f0information in speech segmentation and specific questions of cue weighting, resynthesized stimuli
will be used – the methodological problems this procedure involves will also be discussed.
References:
Bartels, Sonja, Isabelle Darcy & Barbara Höhle. 2009. Schwa syllables facilitate word segmentation for
9-month-old German-learning infants. Paper presented at Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Boston
University Conference on Language Development, Somerville, M.A.
Baumann, Stefan, Martine Grice & Ralf Benzmüller. 2001. GToBI – a phonological system for the
transcription of German intonation. Paper presented at Prosody 2000: Speech recognition and
synthesis, Adam Mickiewicz University: Poznan.
Braun, Bettina, Muna Pohl & Katharina Zahner. 2014. Speech segmentation is modulated by peak
alignment: Evidence from German 10-month-olds.
Fernald, Anne. 1985. Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and
Development 8, 181-95.
Jessen, M., K. Marasek & K. Claßen. 1995. Acoustic correlates of word stess and the tense/lax
opposition in the vowel system of German. Paper presented at Proceedings of the 13th International
Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm.
Jusczyk, Peter W., Elizabeth A. Hohne & Angela Bauman. 1999. Infants’ sensitivity to allophonic cues
for word segmentation. Perception & Psychophysics 61, 1465-76.
Jusczyk, Peter W., Derek M. Houston & Mary Newsome. 1999. The Beginnings of Word Segmentation
in English-Learning Infants. Cognitive Psychology 39, 159-207.
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Kohler, Klaus. 1991. Terminal intonation patterns in single-accent utterances of German: phonetics,
phonology and semantics. Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung
der Universität Kiel (AIPUK) 25, 115-85.
Mattys, Sven L. & Peter W. Jusczyk. 2001. Do Infants Segment Words or Recurring Contiguous
Patterns? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, 644-55.
Saffran, Jenny R., Elissa L. Newport & Richard N. Aslin. 1996. Word Segmentation: The Role of
Distributional Cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 606-21.
Schneider, Katrin & Bernd Möbius. 2007. Word stress correlates in spontaneous child-directed
speech in German. Paper presented at 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech
Communication Association, Antwerp, Belgium.
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